Passementerie

Looking after myself (while I still can)

The day draws ever-closer.  Next week I will be full term, although the baby isn't due until mid-January and it is beginning to dawn on me that I should start washing baby clothes, packing a bag for the hospital and working out how to assemble the Bugaboo before very much more time goes by.

In the meantime though, I have been reminded (with an accompanying box from Neal's Yard) to spend as much time as humanly possible pampering myself right now while I still can and with this in mind I have been bathing nightly with Neal's Yard Mother's Oil and slathering my rapidly expanding belly with their fabulous Mother's Balm.  I love that shop.  The smell, the grown-up, old-fashioned yet unutterably chic dark blue glass bottles...

I have also been taking care of my face with unusual vigour (which has been paying off, I should add) and have been spending inordinate periods of the day in the bathroom playing with my impressive collection of cleansers, oils, serums and gels (pass through Duty Free as often as I have in the last couple of years and Clarins just sticks to you) - Dr Hauschka, Institut Esthederm and Clarins have been the top three brands in my routine for the last week.  Curiously though, I find myself out of hand cream.  I had a tube of the wonderful Aveda Hand Relief in Marrakech that I lost somehow between there and Paris.  Perhaps it's time for a restock...

Finally, today I had my first session with an acupuncturist and it was WONDERFUL.  She combined it with shiatsu and then spent about 20 minutes working on the catastrophe that is my back (I might be a cheerful person, but goodness am I a tense person and only being able to sleep on my right side at night has wrought havoc with me).  I left her house positively floating and with a second appointment for next Monday.

So.  Question time.  Do you make a space in your day or week to relax and how do you do it?

Less talk, more pictures, please!

I never showed you these photos of my sitting room, did I?  It's just as well I took these when I did, because I don't think we've had a bright day since!  Apologies for the dead flowers on the piano - the ones there today (I always have fresh flowers) are alive and well, you'll be glad to learn...

A closer shot of our Indian gods from Jaisalmer - they were on either side of our fireplace in Paris too, if you remember...

A Venetian mask which I embellished with peacock feathers for a ball in Dublin a couple of years ago - the embroidered green silk dress I wore with it will be getting another outing for a summer ball here in Oxford next year...

Finally, a very *un*embellished picture of me this evening - no makeup, tousled hair, appalling outfit and bad lighting, but look at the size of me! And still a month to go!

Climbing a Turquoise Mountain

We've only been in England for a couple of months but we're already getting itchy feet.  We are committed to four years here, so don't get over-excited - I won't be reporting any dramatic decisions for a while yet, but we have been keeping our eyes open for places we could live in at some point in the future - not like Marrakech or Paris though.  Our next stop after Oxford is definitely going to be Philadelphia, where John's family lives, but it won't be our last stop by any means.  We dream of a place with as rich a cultural heritage as our last two homes, certainly, but perhaps a place where we could be more involved in the preservation or redevelopment of this heritage.  We are still at the dreaming stage of our plans, but one country which has cropped up in these dreams is Afghanistan.  An organisation in Afghanistan already working incredibly hard to preserve the rich cultural and artistic heritage of Kabul is Turquoise Mountain.



From their site: "Developers are threatening to demolish the medieval cities of Afghanistan; the last masters of traditional Afghan arts are dying; high unemployment is breeding extremism; Afghans need jobs, skills, economic opportunities and a renewed pride in their national culture. The Turquoise Mountain Project will conserve a section of a medieval city, work with householders to improve living conditions, restore ancient buildings and create an academy to preserve and develop traditional skills. The project will provide vocational training, improve the living conditions of poor citizens, conserve heritage, foster the export market for Afghan goods and lay the foundations for tourism. The Turquoise Mountain (Firuzkuh in Dari) was the greatest indigenous Afghan capital of the middle ages, destroyed by Ogodei, son of Genghis Khan in ca. 1220-22 and lost to history. Its only surviving monument is the magnificent Minaret of Jam. The name of the project evokes Afghanistan's unique tradition of art and architecture."



Some of the beautiful arts being kept up by the work of the foundation can be purchased from Turquoise Mountain Arts and you can make a donation to their work here.

Images from the Turquoise Mountain website with thanks.

A combination of increasingly advanced pregnancy and the cold weather has prevented me from getting out and meeting as many new people here in Oxford as I should.  This, the culture shock of living in such a small town (only 150,000 people!) and the fact that John has been working so hard all term (after nearly two years of being almost constantly in each other's company) had left me feeling a little gloomy about Oxford and keen to plot what our next life will be, but this weekend restored my faith in life as term has now ended and, although it may seem like a contradiction, we were finally able to have a fabulously Oxfordy weekend.

Friday evening was the graduate Christmas dinner in University College's seventeenth century dining hall, which had been suitably decorated for the occasion, complete with silver candelabra and menus.  Although you can find yourself sitting with a group of friends at hall, often you are sitting beside near or complete strangers, which can work out either way really.  To illustrate: to my left I had a girl who appeared to be in her final undergraduate year at Oxford and interrogated my husband about his course in between ostentatiously applying her lipstick at the table.  When he suggested that although the course was tough (and it is - lethally so), the structure might be easier for an Oxford graduate to slot into than someone coming from another university, she responded with "Yes, well, we have *real* degrees", so we left her to complain to her mortified boyfriend about the food for the rest of the meal and chatted to the people on our other side instead, who turned out to be lovely, one even having lived in Morocco too for a while.

Saturday was a day of blissful nothingness, both of us having achieved all our deadlines and being completely at leisure to read, bake and stare blankly and luxuriously into space, which is exactly what we did.  Baking has become a feature of my life lately and is giving me endless pleasure as well as, well, endless apple pies.

Yesterday was heavenly - the morning was sunny and frosty, so we wrapped up in our warmest coats and donned our most serious wellies and headed out along the river, past all the brightly painted and cosy-looking houseboats to the Port Meadow, a 440 acre common by Jericho.  The middle of the meadow was flooded, as it often is, and everything around it was coated in glistening rime frost.  There were woolly ponies, woolly dogs and woolly children as far as the eye could see and ducks anxiously picked their way across the ice.  Afterwards we went to the Jericho Tavern where we snuggled over hot chocolate before wandering home in the lunchtime sunset (or so it seems, here) for .

Still dithering over Christmas shopping?  How about some antique French linen or beautiful photographic prints?

Frosty picture of the Port Meadow with thanks to Sarah Laurence.

I want this.

I may need to build an extension to my house in order to create a room suitable for it, because black and white doesn't really fit in any of my, well, four existing rooms (did I mention that our new house is quite small?).  Well, now that I think of it, it could go on the bed on the white duvet cover weeks, couldn't it?

Cushion from Liberty.

Turning into Mrs Miniver

I hesitate to mention it so soon, but it came to my attention recently that 2009 is rapidly approaching.  2009 will bring with it all sorts of new and exciting things (a baby, for instance) but that's not all.  A new year means a new diary and this is not a matter that should be left to chance; a diary can colour your whole outlook, particularly if you are reasonably impressionable, which I find that I still am these days, having recently moved to a new country and with so much change ahead of me next year.  I feel that I have to take an active part in how I form myself for the coming months, and what better start than a chic diary?

So it happened that when I found myself in London yesterday with an hour to spare, I naturally thought "Liberty! Diary!" because what else does a girl think on a December afternoon in London when she is wearing a nice hat and has an hour on her hands?

I knew exactly which one I wanted, too.  Leather, embossed with the Ianthe pattern, a week on every two pages, and GREEN.  Not for me the quandary of Mrs. Miniver - I knew before I even saw it that the green one was the only one for me and I had taken to heart her point of how little the difference in price between an ordinary diary and a truly fabulous one is, when viewed in the context of the whole year - little more than the cost of a taxi ride, in fact.  It even came in an elegant purple box, with the diary inside wrapped in tissue paper.

This year I have been using a neat little Moleskine page-per-day diary, but impending motherhood has made me very alert to the necessity keeping a firm grip on style and glamour.  A visit to the hairdresser must always now conclude with making the *next* appointment, for instance, instead of leaving it to whim and dire need several months down the line.  There will be many style challenges next year, but standards must be maintained, and so my diary must be chic. 

If, somehow, you do not know who Mrs Miniver is, then first of all, shame on you and secondly, you must go and buy a copy to read immediately.

Images with thanks to here, here, here and here.